1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information exchange in unified communications systems including telephony systems, electronic mail systems, voice mail systems, fax communications systems, Internet web-based systems and other communications systems. Particularly, the invention relates to facilitating the exchange of Universal Resources Locators (URLs) and Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) with an acceptable level of security between systems without a pre-defined relationship over a standard phone line.
2. Description of the Background Art
Unified communications systems integrate a variety of communications systems, such as instant messaging, chat, presence, telephony, data collaboration-including presentation sharing, desktop sharing, application sharing, whiteboard sharing, editable document sharing with audit trails, video, email, voicemail and short message services, such that users are able to exchange information in various formats in the unified communications systems. However, the exchange of information between two or more parties in a unified communications system relies on a control mechanism such as a federation and a clearing house, which implies a formal relationship between the two parties. Both federation and clearinghouse mechanisms result in inconvenient and inefficient set-ups for information exchange, which is not suitable for information exchange between a sender and a receiver that have no or little relationship.
Web-based applications of a unified communications system, such as Microsoft SharePoint™, Google applications, file sharing of Flickr, YouTube and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook™ or MySpace™) allow users to communicate with a shared organizer, which implies communications set-up and some forms of formal relationship. However, existing web-based communications are still cumbersome in exchanging URLs or URIs between multiple parties. For example, a caller places a telephone call to another individual, listens as the other individual verbally provides an email address over the phone, and then sends an email message to the email address with the URL to be exchanged; or the caller and the other individual must be actively using the unified communication system. In yet another example, two parties uses cell phones and one party sends a short text message to the other party regarding the URL to be exchanged. A URI or a URL is used to identify or name a resource. A URL is a URI that, in addition to identifying a resource, provides means of acting upon or obtaining a representation of the resource by describing an access mechanism or network “location.” From herein and throughout the specification, “URL” and “URI” are used interchangeably.
Traditionally, when dialing a telephone, a telephone number is encoded and transmitted across a telephone line as telephone tones, such as Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) tones. The tones “control” the telephone system by instructing where to route the call. These control tones are sent over the same telephone communications channel and in the same band as the voice and other sounds of the telephone call. One problem with DTMF is that the telephone tones are very loud and annoying to human senders and receivers. Further, when sending data that has low error tolerance, such as a URL transmitted using a modem, traditional DTMF signaling faces challenges to provide a secure and user friendly way to exchange URL over telephone communications channels.
As alluded to above, existing telephony systems in use today are not designed to exchange information for web-based applications, such as a URL for web conferencing, over telephone communications channels, especially in a secure and user friendly way. For example, one individual verbally provides a URL for a web conferencing session to a second individual using a telephone. Existing telephony systems do not have mechanisms to electronically exchange the URL even if sending and receiving apparatus (e.g., telephones) are able to receive such information with a URL encoding/decoding processing unit. The second individual must write down the URL or remember the URL and write it later or must be processed as in above examples, which is not convenient for telephone users to handle while simultaneously conducting a conversation.
The prior art has attempted to provide new variations on the unified communications federation and clearing house concepts by proposing a system where IP addresses can be derived from phone numbers. In such a system, a call established via the standard PSTN network can result in subsequent calls being established using the VoIP network. However, such prior art systems still rely on “a man in the middle” service acting as a clearing house between different entities, which requires some sort of pre-established relationship either between the entities or between the entities and the clearing house. For example, the entity must provide a phone number and IP address association for others to access.
Hence, there is a lack of a system and method that provides information exchange in general between unified communications systems with or without a pre-defined relationship over a communications channel. Particularly, there is a lack of a system and method that provides URL exchange using a telephony system between unified communications systems with or without a pre-defined relationship over a communications channel while providing an acceptable level of security.